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CNN
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People are basically worried about taking on work as long as computers are present, but these fears have felt more realistic than ever for the past year as artificial intelligence has begun to rethink the way people work.
Humanity CEO Dario Amody amplified these concerns in May when he warned that AI could potentially lose work to 20% to 20% over the next 1-5 years. Certain companies are already taking part in AI to do some of the work that was done before. Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce are increasingly using AI to code among other tasks. CEOs of companies ranging from Amazon to JPMorgan have also warned that the human labor will shrink due to AI.
However, some of these predictions deserve a healthy dose of skepticism. “AI is very good, it's going to drive people out of work” is a powerful marketing message for companies selling technology, and a potentially useful excuse for executives who are already pondering their workforce downsizing.
The answer to whether AI actually spells out trouble for human workers is not so black and white. This is mixed about how quickly AI promotes the job market, according to more than half a dozen high-tech insiders CNN has spoken about for the past month.
For example, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNN AI “will kill jobs only if the world runs out of ideas. And Google Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis told CNN that AI's “Jobpocalypse” is one of his small concerns regarding the impact of technology.
Nevertheless, tech companies themselves have reduced thousands of roles this year, hundreds, and sometimes thousands, as they implement AI to gain an increased share of software development and other tasks.
There appears to be a wide consensus that the nature of work changes, including how it is done and which tasks are performed by humans.
A survey by the Pew Research Center released in February shows that over half of Americans are concerned about the impact of AI on the workplace, and believe that AI will reduce their employment opportunities over time. But the nasty AI failure that appears to make headlines every few weeks – from Elon Musk's Grok chatbot, after the company creates a false update of a newspaper running AI-generated summer reading list, spits out anti-Jewish ratios and can't believe that robot workers are widely dependent on horns.
“I think there will be some evacuation. I think there will be new occupations that will come up,” said Gauravubhansal, executive director of the nonprofit startup consultant responsible responsible Innovation Lab. “I think we see complex reshaping rather than simple exclusion.”
And we're just the first.
“I think we're in a decade-like, perhaps even more uncertainty,” Bansal said.
Small circles in Silicon Valley have been debating for years how AI can overturn the labour market, along with suggestions to mitigate its impact, including Universal Basic Income, an approach endorsed by Openai CEO Sam Altman.
However, the conversation has exploded into public scenes in recent months as Tech Giants introduces the “Agent AI” tool.
Unlike chatbots where the user enters one question and returns one relatively simple response at each interaction, Agent AI systems can handle more complex multi-step tasks without step-by-step production. Think about it: Code your website based on what a user's idea looks like, what it looks like, or researching topics and editing them into a presentation.
Openai launched agent mode for ChatGPT last week, which allows users to accomplish tasks, but in May, humanity introduced a model that claims to function independently for almost the entirety.
“Now you can target (AI systems) and automatically break it down into the sequence of steps needed to execute the goal,” Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Agent AI at Amazon Web Services, told CNN. “All of a sudden, there's a reasoning system that lets you use a variety of tools, so now there's really more possibilities now in terms of how it can be used in the workplace.”
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For example, Amazon used AI developer agents to upgrade 30,000 software applications across the company last year. The company said the project was completed to complete 4,500 software developers a year, and 4,500 software developers a year, but AI completed the task in just six months. According to Sivasubramanian, the switch saved Amazon about $250 million in capital expenditure.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said earlier this year that between 20% and 30% of the company's codes are generated by AI. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said about half of the company's code development will be done by AI by next year. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told Bloomberg that the company uses AI for around 30% to 50% of its work.
Unlike previous technology transformations like automation carried out in industrial environments, AI can be relatively easily employed to improve or take over human tasks.
“AI workers don't have to buy expensive physical machines because they're just software,” said Steven Adler, a former Openai researcher. “AI workers can also easily upgrade if they have a more powerful version. Especially for businesses that are used to get software from the cloud, there is less friction than ever (to deploy) “virtual coworkers” products. ”
While certain categories of work, such as coding and data analysis, are ripe for more serious confusion, many experts argue that other roles will undergo changes rather than completely eliminated. According to them, most workers use AI to automate repetitive tasks and leave more time to tackle creative or relational aspects of their work.
For example, a doctor can take notes to an AI assistant during a patient's visit, autonomously filling out the charts, giving the doctor more time for face-to-face discussions with the patient.
“Most tasks in most jobs cannot be automated,” Meta scientist Jan Lekun said in a LinkedIn post last month.
Put another way, AI said “the subset of the tasks human workers are currently doing is “good, but not perfect,” but it can't completely replace most people, Yacine Jernite, who said machine learning and society are leading the embrace of open source AI companies.
Businesses and governments are investing in training workers in the age of AI. This includes the AI Training Academy for Teachers, which is a group of high-tech Giants partnering with teachers' unions to build in New York City. Last month, the White House launched a corporate pledge signed by 68 companies to pledge investments in AI training and education for American youth.
Dennis Woodside, CEO of IT and customer service management software company Freshworks, said his company is changing workers who once responded to customer support requests (work that AI does easier) to more hands-on jobs with clients.
Some people in the industry believe that AI will remove some jobs, but they will also create new categories of jobs that are unthinkable at the moment.
“In the Internet age, trillions of dollars of economic value are created each year, and we found that some of the biggest, most valuable and most successful companies launched back then are prominent in the economy today.” “There should be a positive benefit to Net-Net employment growth. It's just going to be a different job.”
Still, Jernite said that American leaders may feel pressured to make a difference simply because they heard that AI can replace their work.
“And then people go in that direction and fire people. It has nothing to do with what technology can and can't do, but it has nothing to do with how it is perceived,” Jernite said. “Then they rehire those people when they realize that it's not how to use this truly amazing technology in a responsible and sustainable way.”
The transition can be uncomfortable. Adler, a former Openai researcher, said he expects that as AI expands their work, many white-collar workers will see lower wages.
“AI will make individual workers more productive and allow more people to do specific jobs,” Adler said. “The net effect is oversupply of labor, which will push wages down unless labor demand rises significantly.”
Ultimately, Bangsal said he believes policymakers must create a new economic framework in the AI era to ensure that normal workers are not just strong tech companies with less opportunities and productive pressure. And ideally, they should travel much faster than they did in dealing with the challenges posed by the waves of previous technology.
“We need a new social contract in this era,” he said. “The bargains we have between workers and the kind of economy come from different technical ages.”
Lisa Eadiccco from CNN contributed to this report.
